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Poems • These days, we are meatless. My mother still dreams of a pig fat enough to feed us all for a month, though we have long since lost our talent for slaughter. • Once, Quân threatened a flood so that the sea and land might be joined. Âu Co’ fled with half her children, taught them to plant khoai lang in pockets of warm earth. Quân carried away all who remained on his back, and they lived as fishermen. • Once, there was nothing to hold onto but the prayers that streaked from my mother’s mouth, her belief that I would live longer if oiled and blessed, that when she died, there would be someone left to ask after her bones. • Once, we wanted to believe that we’d survive the flood because we were born from a collision of mountain and sea. Because nothing has ever held us as closely as water. 62 The Poetry Review
page 63
Poems PAULA BOHINCE Tortoiseshell Comb Tawny and brown, owlish, heavy as molasses and honey, an animal all mouth, teeth bared to bite the chignon (blond on top and brunette at the nape) of this café’s one breath-taker, ‘coltish’, as some girls are called: long-maned, long-legged. Silver star at her crown, I trim Mother’s little bangs, kneel on stone and straighten her head, slow-walk the scissors. Outside her house, colts caper in dusk. A breathless butterfly beats itself to death, fast then slow, woozy in leopard air. With an accident settlement, her mother bought a mink and some diamonds, smoked and wore them under an afghan. She lifted her visiting children by the scruff. Mother-tabby: sharpclawed, bent. Harrowing against such gentleness. Warm, the comb, I imagine. Sun-suffused as the coin of solitude, tossed end over end: endlessly beauty, horror, then beauty again. 63 The Poetry Review

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Poems

• These days, we are meatless. My mother still dreams of a pig fat enough to feed us all for a month, though we have long since lost our talent for slaughter. • Once, Quân threatened a flood so that the sea and land might be joined. Âu Co’ fled with half her children, taught them to plant khoai lang in pockets of warm earth. Quân carried away all who remained on his back, and they lived as fishermen. • Once, there was nothing to hold onto but the prayers that streaked from my mother’s mouth, her belief that I would live longer if oiled and blessed, that when she died, there would be someone left to ask after her bones. • Once, we wanted to believe that we’d survive the flood because we were born from a collision of mountain and sea. Because nothing has ever held us as closely as water.

62 The Poetry Review

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